Page 37 of Christmas in Coconut Creek

As if I ever could after that.

The echo of a hand speaker sparking to life was all that kept me from jumping him again.

“You can’t be in the ocean after dark,” a crackling voice called over the crash of the surf. “Please exit the water.”

I could faintly make out two men standing in the topless Jeep and looking down at Frankie and me. The probe of the lights blinding as I hugged a forearm over my chest while my other came up to shade my eyes.

“Yeah, all right,” Frankie shouted back, both of us realizing there was no way around climbing stark naked out of the ocean for an audience. “Stay put,” he ordered me.

I giggled behind him as the bright lights silhouetted that slim figure and bubbly little ass while he emerged from the water with his hands cupped over his modesty.

I felt like a teenager again, getting caught fooling around by my parents. Except this time it was much more humiliating, because Frankie was pushing forty and the men in the car had every reason to have us both arrested for public indecency. That would have been a humbling phone call.

“We were just leaving anyway,” Frankie added, pulling his shorts back up his legs while trying his fucking hardest not to flash the chub I knew he had to be sporting. I pinched my lips together as he picked up my clothes and kept me in the shadow behind him. “And, Merry fucking Christmas.”

11

Ididn’tknowhowearly it was when a crescendo of incessant buzzing stirred me awake the next morning. The blackout curtains in Natalia’s guest bedroom were worth their weight in gold.

I groaned with my eyes still closed, blowing weak gusts of air through my lips in an attempt to fan away the strands of knotted hair in my face. Instead of tending to the phone on the nightstand, I flipped around and dug even deeper under the covers, pulling the floral duvet up to my ears.

Whoever it was could wait. As far as I was concerned it was the middle of the night and I was on vacation.

Another minute passed peacefully before the vibration started again, somehow louder and more insistent than it had been the first time. I grumbled into the pillow and then pulled it over my head, willing myself to ignore the annoying wake-up call.

“Answer it or throw it into the ocean,” a voice rumbled beside me. I peeked one eye open at the intruding body in my bed to find my raven-haired best friend splayed out under the covers. We’d taken two bottles of pinot grigio into the room when we got home and never resurfaced. Every sordid, saltwater detail was confessed and relived in vivid, colorful detail.

I began to protest but Nat darted a hand out, pushing my pillow onto the floor and making it impossible to get comfortable again without getting up. With a sigh I rolled back over to the nightstand and answered the buzzing call without so much as looking at the lock screen.

“Hello?”

“Oh, thank goodness, Ms. Brody, I’ve been trying to reach you for an hour.”

I squeezed my eyes closed and tampered my voracious need to growl into the speaker. “Cindy, you know you can just call me Ophelia, right? And I only had one missed call, two minutes ago.”

“I could have sworn it was more than that.”

“Is there something you need?” I asked. “I sent the slides for the full week’s worth of lessons directly to your district email.”

“The children are losing it, Ms. Brody. Little Brandon has told Emily that Santa Claus”—she lowered her voice to a whisper, and I could imagine the plump old woman attached to the wall phone with a hand cupping the receiver—“isn’t real.”

I sat up straighter in bed, pressing my back against the wooden headboard.

“And now the entire class is either in tears or in shock, and they’re looking to me for answers. I think Emily is two steps away from shoving a sparkly pinecone up—”

“Cindy,” I interrupted. “They’re eight years old. I understand the stress, but please don’t let a kid derail the entire day over Santa Claus.”

“What do I do?”

I hopped out of bed and trekked across the hallway into the bathroom. Teaching was never simple, especially at that formative age where opinions were being developed and solidified. Sometimes the solutions were obvious, other times they required a bit more mental gymnastics. Of course I didn’t have any kids of my own, but I grew up surrounded by siblings over a decade younger than me and watched the way my parents handled the hard questions firsthand. Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy—God the world was so magical when you were a kid.

I wedged the cell phone between my ear and my shoulder as I dolloped toothpaste onto a brush. “My best advice is to give them another activity to do, and then assign homework tonight on the mystery of St. Nick. This is something that we shouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. Send out an email to all the parents while the kids are at lunch explaining what happened and the reason for the homework. That’s really all you can do. Like I said, they’re eight; it’s only a matter of time before the veil comes down, but it’s not up to us.”

“Right, right, okay. I can do that,” Cindy said breathily on the other line. “Kids, can we all clean up our colored pencils and get into our reading circles?”

“See? Problem solved. If everything else is fine, I was actually still in bed when you called.”

“It’s eleven in the morning there, Miss Brody.”

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